The 'Windows Movie Maker cannot save the movie to the specified
location' error message is all too common. It tells you to verify your source files are available, the
saving location is there, and there's enough free disk space. You have all of those things, and it still
can't save. We've learned through experience that the message isn't complete enough.

It's become routine to advise users that their project might be
too complex, and to suggest breaking it down into parts, render the pieces, and then put them
together into the final movie... and most of the time it works. One of my fee-based services is to take
the complex project, do the project splitting, and return the sub-projects ready for rendering... I've
never had that work-around fail because the issue was something else.

Why does breaking it down and rendering the parts work? Because there's
a direct relationship between the complexity of a project and the amount of available memory.
You can easily check the status of your memory, and watch it during the rendering to see how close it
gets to the limit... even watch as the rendering crashes when memory usage reaches the limit, followed
by the error message a couple seconds later.

My Toshiba was in the shop for repairs... from August 1 to Sept 6... and
I was working on my older less powerful Dell laptop. With only 144 MB RAM and less than a GB of available
hard drive space, I took the opportunity to check project complexity against available memory. I'm still
looking for the easy to use meter that tells me how close I am to the limit, before having to find out
by doing the rendering. Lacking that, I'm trying to develop rules of thumb about project complexity.
I'm not there yet, but this newsletter gets me a step closer.

... before getting into it, here
are a couple notes...

Notes...

My Toshiba laptop returned on Tuesday, with a new DVD/CD
combo drive and TV Tuner. Both of them were replaced on the last trip just 3 months ago, and the TV Tuner
had never worked since then. CompUSA told me they needed to reinstall the operating system from scratch
if I wanted to see TV on the new tuner.

When it left this time, I told them to do what they needed for me to see
the TV. It came back Tuesday with the operating system exactly where it was when I purchased the laptop
in May 2003. It was working well and I could see TV, but I had more than a few software installations
and updates to do.

The local CompUSA filed two requests to replace the laptop with another
unit because of repeated issues... it wasn't approved. Maybe the 3rd request will be. It's 3 days since
getting it back and my 'standard' issues started again tonight as I finished this newsletter.

.... on to the main topic

a Test Project

I started with an existing wmv file... the 'XML the Beginning'
tutorial made recently by the Persian Poet Gal... a 2 minute and 10 second, 640x480,
602 Kbps, 7.6 MB file.

I could have started with anything... the goal was simply to make a project
more and more complex, render it to a movie at each step, and see how much memory was needed.

Over and over, add more complexity after each successful render, assess
the extra memory needed, and render again until I ran into the upper limit and got the error message.

the computer system

The Dell laptop has a 266 Mhz CPU, a 4 GB hard drive, and 144 MB of RAM.
I bought it new in June 1998 with Windows 98.

In August 2004 I upgraded it to the Home edition of Windows XP.

I had no problems doing the upgrade and the laptop has been running the
best it ever has... even though it's far short of the system considered minimal for XP and Movie Maker
2.

Starting the Project

Before opening Movie Maker, the Dell was using 116 MB of the 144 MB (80
percent of the installed RAM)... it wasn't going to take much complexity to use of the rest of the RAM
and start digging into virtual memory...

Memory usage varies... I assessed things as I went using the Performance
tab of the Windows Task Manager. Before starting a Movie Maker project, there are memory
demands on the computer due to the operating system and other software running.

Opening Movie Maker 2.1added 8 MB of memory to the total used... not much. The Windows Messenger service uses
over 20 MB when I'm not even online. Sonic's MyDVD 4.5 uses 58 MB of memory when opened, before starting
a DVD project.

Another 24 MB of memory was needed to create the start of the project
, to get it to the point shown at the left... the single clip of the starting wmv file was on
the timeline and split into 5 sub-clips.

Total memory usage at this point was 148 MB, which was 4 MB over the installed
RAM... the project was starting to use virtual memory. When it does that, there's a significant slowdown
as using the hard drive is much slower than using RAM.

If you don't mind going that slow, you can keep going until the combined
total of RAM and virtual memory reaches your established limit.

Virtual Memory

The
virtual memory setting gave Windows XP as much as 432 MB of the hard drive space to use as if it was
installed RAM... adding that to the 144 MB of RAM, the Dell could go as high as 576 MB of memory before
it gets the message from Movie Maker about not being able to save the movie.

On this system, most or all of the memory available for rendering is from
virtual memory, not installed RAM.

If we run out of memory, we can increase the virtual memory maximum size
instead of purchasing more RAM... right?? Yes, we'll see.

Make a mental note of the Initial size of 432 MB... we'll mention it below.

Add Complexity and Watch
the Effects on Memory Usage...

Anything added to a project adds complexity... and more complexity adds
more demands on memory. How much?? We'll look.

Adding complexity happens routinely as you work on the project... keeping
an eye on the effects of the complexity, and where you are relative to your memory limit by using your
Task Manager...

Task Manager - Processes
Tab

The Processes tab of the Task Manager helps you see what's using your memory,
and lets you close down some processes that are not needed when you render a movie... that's one way
to free up some additional memory if needed.

Movie Maker, with no project open, is using a bit over 12 MB of memory...
the two lines starting with NAVA... are for Norton Antivirus, things I could close down to gain 6-1/2
MB of memory. I tend to leave them and other processes running.

Task Manager - Performance
Tab

To track the effect of adding complexity, use the Performance tab of the
Task Manager.

The Commit Charge (Memory Limit) is the key item to watch. Compare it to
the other two numbers in the lower left block, the Total memory being used, and the Peak memory level
reached since the computer was last started up.

This picture shows the laptop after a fresh reboot, with Movie Maker running
but no project open.

It's telling me that the current memory demands from all running processes
total 142 MB... that the current Limit is 356 MB... and that the highest or Peak demand for memory since
the laptop last started up was 143 MB.

After checking the running processes and the memory needed for them, and
setting up the Task Manager to watch things... it's time to add the complexity and note the effects.
In doing it, realize that these numbers are precise, but things change so dynamically on the system that
you can only use the numbers as approximations when trying to draw conclusions.

Rendering the Simple Project

To see how memory needs change with the choice of quality, I did some renderings
without changing the project.

The memory used just before rendering was 148 MB. The memory needed to ramp
up to the first couple percent progress points (I didn't spend the time to finish the renderings... the
memory needed ramps up pretty quickly to the maximum level for the profile selected):

The horizontal red line shows 46 MB was needed to render it to a DV-AVI
file... the numbers in the vertical bars are the file sizes of the compressed WMV files, with the scale
at the right showing the memory used to render them.

Maybe I made a mistake noting the memory needed for the 8 MB file... or
maybe it really was an anomaly... it doesn't change the overall pattern so I didn't do a retest.

The bottom line is that, for a given project, rendering higher quality compressed
WMV files needs more memory than rendering a DV-AVI file... and rendering a low quality compressed file
needs less.

With the highest memory demands being for a high quality WMV file, I did
all the remaining tests using the WMV option at the highest file size choice that Movie Maker offered...
the maximum size allowed moved up as the project timeline got longer. As complexity increased, the size
of the rendered movie went from the 1 MB limit above to one as large as 331 MB.

Adding Complexity

Here are the steps I used to make the project larger and more complex...
and the effects on the memory needed. I looked at the changes in memory usage in two places. How much
more was used when having the project open on the timeline, before the rendering? And then, how much
more memory was needed to render the movie.

8 MB were used to open MM2, and another 24 to get the project started with
its 5 clips. The rendering of the basic no-frills project to a 32 MB WMV file needed 120 MB. These are
the baseline needs; I'll note the changes from there.

1 - added one random
effect to each of the 5 clips... 14 MB more (60% increase) was needed for the project,
but nothing extra needed to render it to a 32 MB movie.

This was the first clue that the addition of video effects has minimal
effects on the memory needed for rendering.

2 - added a
transition between each clip, 4 transitions total... with default durations... 24
MB more (60% increase) was needed for the project, and 17 more (15% increase) for the rendering to
a 32 MB movie.

3 - maximized the
transition durations by overlapping the clips as much as possible, reducing the total length
of the movie. There was no change in the memory needed for the project, but 27 more was needed to
render it, although the maximum file size choice had gone down from 32 MB to 20.

Steps 2 and 3 combined was the first clue that the memory needed to
render transitions is more significant.

4 - added 5 more
effects to the 1st, 3rd and 5th clips, to the maximum allowed of 6 per clip... the
increased memory needed to work on the project was 9 MB and there was a decrease of 9 MB in the memory
needed to render it to a 20 MB file.

5 - added 5 more
effects to the 2nd and 4th clips... only 1 more MB was used when working on the
project, and 12 more to render it to the 20 MB movie.

Steps 4 and 5 combined reinforced what I saw in step 1 about video effects
not needing more memory to render the movie.

6 - rebooted
the computer... which cleared memory to the tune of reducing the total used by 34 MB.

This was the first of a few reboots during the testing, each one showing
significant memory reductions. Something was happening to clear the air during reboots.

7 - added a single
music wma file... the sample Beethoven clip. 4 more MB was needed for the project
itself and 15 additional for the rendering to a 20 MB movie.

Adding music added more memory demands than adding effects, but less
than transitions.

8 - added a single
text overlay to the first 40 seconds... using the scroll perspective animation.
14 more MB was used to work on the project and 48 more to render it to a 20 MB movie.

Adding a text overlay required significantly more memory, especially
to the rendering step.

This completed the basic project... it was now a 1 minute, 20 second timeline
with 5 video clips, packed with special effects and transitions, and topped with background music and
a long text overlay.

At this point I rebooted and jogged the total memory usage back down by
45 MB... after the memory usage was cleared with the reboot, the project open in MM2 was using only 12
MB more than before I started adding the clips to create the project. The rebooting had saved over 65%
of the memory being used as the project was being built.

This drove home what I had seen of the memory savings from the first reboot
in step 6.

The renderings weren't close to running into my total available memory limit.
I'll change tactics to increase the complexity from here.

Doubling and Doubling Again...
till it Crashes

9 - copied and pasted
all the clips in the project... doubling the project duration to 2:40. It used 39 more
MB to work on the timeline, but memory to render it to a 41 MB movie went down by 20 MB.

I was wondering if copying/pasting the same clips results in some efficiencies
over having totally different clips... I don't know. Even if there are efficiencies, the complexity was
going up due to overall project size increases.

At this point, each doubling of the project also doubled the file size limit
for the saved movie... the same profile was being used each time.

10 - doubled
again to 5:21. Memory used to view the project went up another 19 MB, and memory needed to render it
to an 82 MB movie rose another 13 MB... very modest increases in memory needs.

11 - doubled
again to 10:41. Only 4 more MB needed to view the timeline, but an increase of 59 MB in what was used
to render it to a 165 MB movie.

12 - doubled
again to 21:23. 27 more MB to view the timeline... and didn't know yet what was needed to render it to
a 331 MB movie file.

The project had reached the complexity level needed to two-block the memory
of the Dell laptop. It had

64 special transitions, most
of them significantly longer durations than the default

16 music clips

16 title overlays

The memory to do the rendering reached the limit of 576 MB (144MB RAM + 432
MB of virtual memory = 576 MB)...

I got the familiar error message... in this case I was happy to see it so
I could get on with the rest of the newsletter.

Memory usage ramps up pretty quickly in the rendering process, reaching
close to peak levels within the first couple percent of progress... that saves a lot of wasted rendering
time, as you can cancel the process and think about what to do.

If memory usage is over 95% of the Limit, you might still reach it at some
point later in the rendering. If you have more slack than that, you should be able to finish.

13 - I was increasing
project complexity to reach this point... but instead of breaking it back down into parts to render separately,
I wanted to go forward by raising the virtual memory limit.

I changed it to a maximum of 500 MB...

... and rebooted...

... and tried the render again.

The Final Render

With the new higher virtual memory setting, I started the final render.

It started at 01:34 am on Sept 5th... and took almost 30 hours to complete.
Obviously I didn't watch it the whole time. Here are some of the data points I noted:

493 MB of usage at 0% with a projection of 981 more minutes...
500 MB and still at 0% with 1317 minutes left...
529 MB at 1% with 1709 minutes to go...

529 MB at 2% with 1950 more minutes projected

... 3% - 1991 minutes left (the projected time was still growing to this
point)

570 MB at 23% (with a peak of 583 MB so far) with 1540 minutes to go

541 MB at 24% with 1505 minutes left

612 MB at 54% with 900 minutes to go

622 MB at 60% with 790 minutes left

605 MB at 64% with 708 minutes to go (with a peak so far of 632,616)

590 MB at 69% with 597 minutes to go

... 10:30 am on Sept 6th - the rendering had finished sometime overnight.
The peak memory usage was 641,548, just a few MB less than the higher Limit... I pressed the Finish button
and watched the movie. It played fine...

Cross-Check on Rendering
to DV-AVI

My Toshiba laptop had returned, and I moved the project over to it... I
wanted to confirm that rendering this complex project to a DV-AVI file used less memory than the high
quality WMV option I'd been using. The chart early on in the newsletter says it should be less memory
intensive.

It confirmed it. Peak memory usage during rendering to a DV-AVI file was
359 MB on the Toshiba, while rendering the WMV used 400, over 10% more (it probably was higher... I cancelled
the rendering when it was at a few percent complete).

Conclusions and Closing

The rendering on the Dell finished successfully, but it took almost 30 hours
to render a complex high quality 21-1/2 minute movie... Rendering is CPU intensive and the 244 Mhz laptop
was running mostly at 100% CPU utilization throughout... an advantage of it being a lower powered computer
is that it didn't overheat.

What are the lessons learned or reinforced by this week's testing?

Project complexity and memory demands go hand in
hand... but so does the choice of the file type to render to (DV-AVI versus compressed WMV) and the
compression quality level.

On a relative rather than absolute scale, project
complexity increases significantly more when special transitions and text overlays are added... compared
to adding special video effects and music.

Rebooting Movie Maker and your computer frees up
lots of memory... do it just before the final big render and it could very well be the difference
between success and the standard error message.

If your project is too complex for your current virtual
memory setting, change it. On the Dell with 144 MB of RAM, I bumped the Virtual Memory setting up
over 15% from 432 to 500 MB... I could have raised it higher... Virtual memory is hard drive space...
the 144 MB of RAM was less than 25% of the 644MB of total memory being used.

I look forward to comments and discussion about this and other newsletters on the forums at:

I'm involved in many things that support users of Movie Maker and Photo Story, and adding more regularly.
Some are free and others reasonably priced.

Radio and Podcasting

TheDVShow
is the only weekly Podcast having more useful information about desktop video editing and production
than anywhere else on the Web. Digital video editing, nonlinear editing, streaming media, software releases,
tutorials, business tips, technical help, download of the day and news on the latest products to make
everything easier. It's where professional and consumer desktop video users go to stay on the cutting
edge.

Call the phone mail machine to get your technical question answered on the air... call (206)-203-3516

The radio broadcast is from Boston, and the website has downloadable podcast files. The June 19th
2005 podcast included the first 'bi-weekly' show with a segment about Movie Maker 2.

Movie Maker 2 - Zero to Hero - with support on the publisher's forum -
Friends of Ed

MaximumPC's winter 2005 quarterly special... had a 7 page tutorial 'Make a Killer Home Movie with
Maker 2'. The special edition of the video made for it is now
on
my website as a file download.

Learning VirtualDub - published by
Packt
Publishing, is the first book about VirtualDub software. I wrote the first chapter about downloading
and setting up the software: VirtualDub, VDubMod and AVISynth.

Older newsletters (more than 6 issues ago) are posted by Rob Morris to an
Archive Site
at his Windows Movie Makers website. Links from website pages to specific newsletters make it easier
for the website viewer to see the content of both while browsing a topic.

Drop an email to suggest a newsletter topic... I can use more requests rather than fewer.

Software

Add-On Transitions and Effects

Transition
Maker 2(TM2) is a utility for the ultimate in making your own personal and custom
transitions for Movie Maker 2. It's a joint product from Patrick Leabo, the programmer, and myself. Version
2 was released a week ago and I'm still working on updating the online tutorial.

I
routinely beta test the Pixelan
packages and think very highly of their people and products.

To others it's $10. To order, use the button on the top of the Managing > Personal Database page.

Online Gallery

An online gallery that fully aligns with the main priority of the website is the
'PapaJohn Expert Zone'
at neptune.

Check it at Neptune
and the Distributing > Neptune page of the website, where there's a developing tutorial about how to
use the service.

Training

in conjunction with the Portage, Michigan library, I offer two free training sessions
about Movie Maker, an intro session and a workshop. The upcoming scheduled sessions are:

Monday - September 19 - 6-7:30 - Intro to Movie Maker

Monday - October 10 - 6-7:30 - Workshop

Other fee-based services

If
you can't save a movie because your project has become too complex, e-mail a copy and
I'll divide it into manageable sub-projects, and provide detailed instructions about how to render the
parts and assemble them into your final movie. $49.95 (no cost if it's not the right solution or doesn't
work) - for details, see the sidebar on the Problem Solving > Can't Save a Movie page of
www.papajohn.org

Movie Maker 2/Photo Story training and support services start at $50 per hour - send
an email - PapaJohn@CharterMi.net
and I'll help you determine your needs, and work with you to plan and implement them.

Wedding combo website/video packages - starting at $2,500 + travel expenses. See
Jill-MarkWedding
or the bottom branch of the Movie Maker 2 website for a sample of what you can expect for the online
portion of the package.

Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other
countries.

About John 'PapaJohn' Buechler from Microsoft.com

John "PapaJohn" Buechler, of Kalamazoo, Mich., goes by PapaJohn online.
An avid user of Movie Maker since its first release, and a regular supporter
of the community of Movie Maker users, John received a 2003 MVP award
from Microsoft for that support. In March 2003, he started a comprehensive
website about Movie Maker 2 at
www.PapaJohn.org.
He maintains the website, writes books and articles, teaches, and provides
support services - all for the community of Movie Maker 2 users. An engineer
by formal education, John is a computer database and multimedia expert
by business and personal experience. He co-authored the first book about
Movie Maker 2 and is actively working on a second one. You can find his
advice in the
Windows XP Movie Maker newsgroup and in the Windows
Movie Makers Forums.

This
newsletter is republished with permission of John "PapaJohn" Buechler.Please note that this is an archive of newsletters and some information
may become outdated. PapaJohn, and the webmaster of this site, provides this
information"AS IS" with no warranties.